communist left

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Sexual freedom is impossible under capitalism

We are publishing here an article written by one of our very close contacts in collaboration with ICC militants.  We want to salute the comrade’s willingness to contribute to the ongoing discussions and clarification of one of the burning social issues of the time—gay “rights”-- from a working class perspective.  We also want to express our appreciation for the focus the comrade chose to give in writing this article.  We think it is refreshing to approach the issue from the angle of human emotions.  We also agree with the comrade’s political understanding and argumentation.  We invite all our close contacts to work in collaboration with ICC militants to write about issues of concern for the clarification and emancipation of working class thought.

The “debate” over whether gay and lesbian people should enjoy the “right” to legally marry and draw from such legal recognition all the financial benefits granted to heterosexual married couples –survivor’s benefits among the most hotly contested— has long been one of those hot button issues the ruling class periodically pulls out of its hat, most notably around election time.  In this article we would like to highlight the hypocrisy of the ruling class left, center, and right in taking up the issue from either a “humanistic” point of view—the left’s and center’s—or a moralistic/religious standpoint on the right.  The Obama administration likes to show itself as “liberal” and “progressive,” hence its call to reverse the anti-gay marriage laws passed at the state level (most recently by referendum in North Carolina), without, however, attempting to make gay marriage a constitutional “right.”  The right needs to satisfy the fears and quell the insecurities of its particularly conservative electoral base, hence the Republican Party to-be-nominee Mitt Romney’s anti-gay marriage stance.  The whole “debate” is really a ploy by the Obama administration to appeal to the youth and “independent-minded,” besides the gay electorate itself, and push Romney to discredit himself with the Evangelists if he does not clearly and forcefully come against gay marriage.  Romney’s further move to the right risks further alienating the undecided and independent sector of the electorate.  It is clear that this legalistic posturing is completely hypocritical.  It aims at utilizing a situation which is certainly experienced as dramatic and humiliating by gay and lesbian people by fueling divisions, animosity, and further misunderstandings for the purpose of political gains.  Further, the at times vehement opposition to gay marriage expressed by the rights should not confuse us as to the fact that the legalization of an aspect of personal life would do nothing to challenge the established system of capitalist exploitation.

Today, if you turned on the television set and surfed over to any mainstream bourgeois news channel, chances are headlines about the “debate over gay rights” might assault the screen. It is interesting how the bourgeois media is insistent on highlighting our personal human differences, in showing us where we disagree the most as people. But the bourgeoisie and their mouthpieces in the press are highly hypocritical. Especially when “partisanship” is so frowned upon in the current political climate. Now, certain factions of the ruling class claim to support gay marriage. Even further, they claim to do so out of a sense of deeper humanism, often referring to the gay rights struggle as a struggle for “equality” or “civil rights.”

It is at this point we have to ask: “equality” in the name of what? And for which people in society? Is “marriage equality” even an appropriate working class demand? Is sexual freedom even possible under capitalism? As workers, we have to say the answer to both of those questions is negative. Building a world free of homophobia and heterosexism, where each individual is viewed and treated as a human being, rather than a category, is impossible under capitalism.

For some time now, elements of the bourgeois political class have advocated the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Often times their arguments are coded in language that appeals to workers. They say that legalizing same-sex marriage would improve the quality of life for gay and queer workers, as they would gain access to insurance benefits, divorce and property rights, etc. But under capitalism, human relations are reduced to a matter of exchange.  Emotions are nothing but mere commodities and finances to the bourgeoisie. So we can see the economic need of legalizing same-sex marriage, but what about the concept of marriage itself within capitalism?

Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that, “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” They later continued, “The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations...On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie.”

So according to Marx and Engels' definition of marriage under capitalism, we can begin to understand that “equal marriage rights” is a term which only applies to those who can afford the benefits of marriage. Rights which only apply to the propertied classes, the people who can even afford to legally marry in the first place. Marriage is fundamentally about property rights and inheritance. It has historically defined which people the ruling class deemed acceptable to own property, and even which people could be owned themselves! Originally of course, marriage meant the possession of the wife and her property by the husband. In the eyes of the bourgeoisie marriage is not at all about mutual respect and love—it's about possession, ownership, and property rights.

But why do we need a ruling class to tell us what marriage is and who we can and cannot marry? As we previously said in Internationalism #130 and in other places in the ICC press, a communist society would instead “be a society beyond the family in which human relationships will be regulated by mutual love and respect and not the state sanction of law.”

The bourgeois democratic state and its agents never pose the questions surrounding gay rights in terms of human need. What are the needs of gay and lesbian folks? Or even the basic needs of human beings in general? There is no question that the repression of the gay and queer community is real. We see homophobia, heterosexism, and patriarchy manifested everywhere in capitalism; anyone saying otherwise is simply in denial. The bullying of gay and queer youth for example has recently been referred to as an “epidemic” in the bourgeois media. Many of these traumatizing events where gay and queer people are bullied lead to depression, and in some cases even suicide.

But does the bourgeoisie focus on solving these issues? What about parliamentary legislation? Do any of the bills and amendments touch on any of these social issues? No! The debate is almost always framed in the context of religion, or moralism. Especially in the mainstream media, especially in the rhetoric of the ruling class. For all the vaunted talks—all the legalistic gibberish—about “human rights,” receiving the capitalist state’s approval and recognition under the guise of the law can do nothing to extirpate centuries long religious and moralistic bigotry. Religious people are “blamed” for their backward attitude, which further contributes to the polarizing, witch hunt-like atmosphere. In situations like these, legalizing same-sex marriage only helps portray the capitalist state as a “just” and “beneficent” entity.

If there is even a grain of sincerity in the ruling class' support of same-sex marriage, it comes from their need to distract workers and immerse them in the circus of electoral politics and legalism. Of course it is true that growing support of sexual freedom is part of humanity developing a deeper scientific understanding, and a greater sense of general human solidarity. But the ruling class cares nothing about these things, and why should they? If you have money your rights are never at risk, or up for debate. “Marriage equality” does not equal a good relationship or economic equality; it equals further class domination from the bourgeoisie.

Social struggles which only partially address the fundamental problems of capitalism, while expressing real social problems that exist in our society, distract the working class from revolutionary tasks and discussions. We have discussed already how the bourgeoisie can become fixated on the debate over gay rights, almost to the point of obsession. But this fixation happens among so-called “revolutionaries” as well.

Many people use language exclusively directed at workers in order to “organize” them around what is in essence a cross-class, broad social issue. The argument that gay rights will bring us “closer to full equality” is completely irrelevant, when it is a basic tenet of communists that full equality is impossible under capitalism. Why as revolutionaries should we be fighting to get “closer” to an egalitarian society? We need to stand against all of capitalisms injustices at once! Many of these same “revolutionaries” would call the legal and electoral decisions in favor of gay marriage rights “victories” for the workers. But these victories do nothing but bolster the appeal of bourgeois civil society.
 

The politics of legalism and democratism have nothing to offer the working class. True human emancipation can only come from working class revolution. Workers should always support gay and queer people themselves, especially in a society where they are alienated and ridiculed in such terrible ways. But we have to remain careful of the bourgeois campaigns which surround these debates. Often times they distract and mislead us from our ultimate goal—ending all forms of repression and exploitation for everyone on earth.

Jam 06/11/12

<출처 :  ICC >  

http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201206/5004/sexual-freedom-impossible-under-capitalism

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 Two Texts on Communisation

Below are two texts on the subject of communisation. The first is by Mac Intosh of Internationalist Perspective. The second an open letter to IP by Maxime of the CDP. An expanded version of Mac Intosh's article will appear in Internationalist Perspective 57.

Communization Theory and the Abolition of the Value-Form

A theory of the value-form as the basis for an understanding of the logic of capital, its historical trajectory, and its contradictions, is integrally linked to a theory of communization. Communization is inseparable from the abolition of the value-form and of capital as valorizing value, and its Akkumulationszwang, its compulsion to accumulate. Communization entails the abolition of the proletariat, the class of waged-workers, whose abstract labor is the source of value. Socialism or communism is not the self-affirmation of the proletariat or worker’s power, and the creation of a republic of labor. The development of value-form theory, based largely on the publication of all the manuscripts that Marx had assembled for his critique of political economy, an undertaking that has only been completed over the past several decades, has also transformed the understanding of socialism or communism that existed within the Second and Third Internationals, as well as in the historical communist left (both the German-Dutch and the Italian left, the council communist and the Bordigist traditions).

The path towards a theory of communization in which value and the proletariat are abolished began with Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) in which the theoretical bases for the formation of a unified Social-Democratic Party in Germany, based on a vision of a “free state,” were subjected to a withering criticism, and in which Marx first outlined his conception of a lower and higher stage of communism. For Marx, in the lower stage of communism, “just as it emerges from capitalist society,” still stamped by its structures and social forms, “the individual producer gets back from society … exactly what he has given to it.” (1) In short, the worker, after deductions for the social funds and expansion of the productive forces, receives the full value of his/her labor: “Clearly, the same principle is at work here as that which regulates the exchange of commodities as far as this is an exchange of equal values. … a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for the same amount in another. (2) For Marx, then, the value-form will preside over both production and distribution in the lower stage of communism, and only in its higher stage “can society wholly cross the narrow horizon of bourgeois right and inscribe on its banner: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!” (3) Communization, then, as the abolition of the value-form in all its modes, would be preceded by a post-capitalist stage in which the law of value still regulated production and consumption. However radical, in the eyes of most socialists, Marx’s prescription was in 1875, today, in a capitalist world where the reproduction of the proletariat is threatened by the capitalist social relation, and the very existence of the value-form, such a vision is completely inadequate.

While Marx did not specify the precise form in which labor-time would determine production and distribution in the lower stage of capitalism, the revolutionary wave that unfolded in 1917 led to the insistence of the Bolsheviks that the dictatorship of the proletariat, whatever its specific political forms, would also be based on the continuation of waged-labor; that the distribution of products to the working class would be via a wage and money. It is here, that a debate arose within the historical communist left, different from the debates over the question of party or workers councils as the organ of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a debate in which Amadeo Bordiga insisted – against Lenin and Trotsky – that the continued existence of wages and money was a mortal threat to the proletariat, and would reproduce capitalist social relations. Two important documents of the historical communist left over the period between 1930-1970, grappled with the question of the value-form and communist production and distribution: The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, a collective text of the GIK (the German-Dutch left) published in 1930, with an important “Introduction” by Paul Mattick to its republication in 1970, and Jacques Camatte’s Capital and Community, written in the aftermath of ’68, within the political orbit of the Italian left (Bordigism). (4)

The Fundamental Principles advanced the idea that communist production and distribution would be based on labor-time accounting (the average socially necessary labor time), with the distribution of products to the workers – whose proletarian condition would be universalized – taking place through a system of “labor vouchers” (Empfangsscheinen or bons de travail), strictly based on the number of hours worked. In contrast, then, to the normal working of the capitalist system, where the market allocates labor and determines value through exchange post festum, in communist production and distribution this determination could rationally be determined by labor time as a measure of value without the intermediary of exchange. This, then, was a system, as Mattick acknowledged in his Introduction, in “which the principle of the exchange of equivalents still prevails,” in which, we maintain, the value-form still shapes social being, in which, as Marx, acknowledged in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, “equal right still constantly suffers a bourgeois limitation,” (5) and labor itself (travail, Arbeit) remains proletarian labor. Mattick, however, also found the GIK’s text to be outdated in some respects, superceded by the very trajectory of capital itself, by the prodigious development of the productive forces between 1930 and 1970, through which goods and services could be produced in such abundance that “any calculation of their individual shares of average socially necessary labor time would be superfluous,” and humankind might proceed directly to what Marx had called the higher stage of communism. (6)

Camatte follows Marx in distinguishing a lower, socialist, and a higher stage of communism, and insists “communism cannot be achieved from one day to the next,” (7) a position based on Bordiga’s claim that there are three post-capitalist stages: the dictatorship of the proletariat, the stage of socialism, and communism. For Camatte, the valorization of value must immediately cease, which he claims is the task of the dictatorship of the proletariat, yet he acknowledges that everyone has to work (“he who does not work, does not eat”), that the proletarian condition must be universalized, that human existence, which in capitalism was mediated by capital, “now is mediated by work.” (8) Moreover, Camatte acknowledges that an “economy of time” will continue to regulate what has now become communal production; that all labor will now be reduced to abstract labor, (9) and that such labor will retain the form of waged labor under the dictatorship of the proletariat, though “…the basis of the phenomenon is not the same. In capitalist society, wage labour is a means to avoid restoring the whole of the product to the individual who produced it. In the transitional phase, wage labour is the result of the fact that it is not possible to destroy the market economy from one day to the next.” (11) But the removal of the traditional capitalist veil does not eliminate the value-form, or the subjection of humankind to its laws of motion. Indeed, the very reduction of all labor to abstract labor, the very universalization of the proletarian condition and its modes of labor, risks the perpetuation of capital and its social relations. Moreover, that prospect is not removed by Camatte’s insistence that the labor vouchers that the worker will exchange for goods and services cannot be accumulated, are “valid for a limited period and is lost at the end of this period if it is not consumed,” (12) thereby preventing a restoration of capitalism. The question is not that of a restoration of capitalism, but rather its continued existence through that of value determined by labor time, and abstract labor, on the bases of which capitalism had never been abolished. For Camatte, it is only at Marx’s higher stage of communism that: “All forms of value are therefore buried; thus labour no longer has a determined form, there is no alienation.” (13)

The question raised by communization theory as it has developed over the past several decades is whether the social imaginary of a period of transition, of lower and higher stages of communism, has not become – at this historical stage of capitalism – one more obstacle to the communist revolution, to communization. (14)

Communization theory, as it has been articulated by pro-revolutionaries over the past several decades can perhaps be summarized in the following terms, in an essay by Bruno Astarian: Communization as a Way out of the Crisis

Communization does not mean that communism will be established by waving a magic wand. It will be established through a process of struggle, with advances and retreats by the revolution. What it means is that the actions undertaken by the revolutionaries will aim at the abolition of work and of value … here and now. When the revolution attacks capitalist property, it does not do so in order to vest the proletariat with the ownership of the property that it did not previously own, but in order to put an end to all forms of property immediately.

In short, the value-form, and the labor [travail, Arbeit] linked to it, must be abolished by the revolution, not as the culmination of a period of transition, as the historical communist left had maintained. Moreover, while communization is the immediate goal of the revolution, Astarian points out that: “We must not confuse immediacy with instantaneity. When we say immediacy of communism, we are saying that the goal of the proletarian revolution no longer consists in creating a transitional society, but in directly establishing communism.” For Internationalist Perspective, what is crucial here is not the specific content of the work or activity that must be immediately transformed, e.g. food or clothing, medicine or houses, will need to be produced. What must be immediately abolished is the reduction of that activity to the abstract labor, and its measurement by socially necessary labor time, that is the historically specific mode in which work has existed in capitalist society. And that, of course, also entails the abolition of a mode of distribution of goods and services by way of labor time, through a form of wage [le salariat] or even labor vouchers. It is in the very course of a revolutionary upheaval, then, and not at the end of a period of transition, that communization occurs. As RS in SIC 1, insists: “The revolution is communisation; it does not have communism as a project and result, but as its very content.”

Indeed, in the revolution itself, the abolition, not just of capital and labor, but also of the proletariat must occur. This is how BL puts it in SIC1: “In this struggle, the seizure of the material means of production cannot be separated from the transformation of proletarians into immediately social individuals: it is one and the same activity, and this identity is brought about by the present form of the contradiction between the proletariat and capital.” It is not, then, some variant of utopian thinking that has led IP to see communization as integral to the revolutionary upheaval itself, but rather the very logic of capital, its specific historical trajectory, and the nature of the capitalist crisis at the present historical conjuncture: the impossibility of the reproduction of the proletarian condition by capital apart from the massive expulsion of proletarian labor from the economy, the creation of a vast planet of slums, and impending ecological catastrophes, all attendant on the perpetuation of the value-form. It is those very real historical and material conditions, which have made communization the immediate task of revolution today.

But what of the abolition of work, which is integral to most theories of communization? Work, as proletarian labor, work as abstract labor, work as it has historically developed and been instantiated by capitalism, must be abolished. Work in its historical form, and the capitalist social relations in which production and distribution is based on average socially necessary labor time, in all its forms, must be immediately abolished. But anti-travail [anti-labor] must be accompanied by a vision of human activity, praxis, which encompasses the realm of production, freed of its historical (including its capitalist) integument. This text is not the place to even begin an elaboration of that theoretical task, but its broad outlines do need to be at least indicated. Communization is not the cessation of production. Quite the contrary! It is the beginning of the self-production of human beings, the auto-production of communist social relations. Human action has not been limited to labor, travail, Arbeit, under the constraint of exploitative and class relations. There is a distinction, then, between techné, poiésis, work, and labor, between the labor of the slave, the serf, the proletarian, and the work [oeuvre, Werke] of the social individual. It is precisely that set of distinctions, between labor and work, and the possibilities to be created by communization which pro-revolutionaries need to begin to explore: production, work, beyond labor. Mac Intosh

Open Letter from Maxime to Internationalist Perspective, echoing the contribution of Mac Intosh on communisation

As I said in a small email prior to IP's "conference" at Arezzo, Mac Intosh appears to engage IP - or emphasize its engagement - in a direction that I approve because it is also mine. Unlike most groups and individuals that we have agreed to call the ultra-left current, this text (it quotes Bruno Astarian, Roland Simon and Bernard Leon [BL] ) attests to a consideration of the positions of those it is also conventional to call the "communisateurs". My belief is that everything that comes from this perspective is not necessarily to be accepted in full or as is, but this vision without a doubt, for me, provides some of the most stimulating reflections on revolutionary theory . The communisateur milieu, I can only state, is much more fertile, far more dynamic than the heirs of the communist left, which sees the newly emerging developments in the evolution of capitalism through the old schemas and categories of political analysis more or less slightly retouched. I think we ( pro-revolutionaries, to use your words) have an interest in fostering the discussion -- even if it entails polemical elements -- with the communisateurs. I noticed that you have already taken the initiative (most recently through your exchange with the Greek group Blaumachen, for example) and that's to the good. The refoundation of communist theory, that I dare claim, for me, as for you, today represents the most urgent task of the “friends of the classless society,” as our Berlin comrades say, cannot be limited to a confrontation with the current designated as the communisateurs (“Théorie communiste” (TC) and those close to it: Blaumachen, Riff-Raff, Léon de Mattis [Denis], BL, etc., all contributing to the new publication SIC., as well as Bruno Astarian and the Dauvé-Nesic group, “Trop Loin.” That refoundation requires what other circles of reflexion contribute too, such as “Exit” and “Krisis,” and the editors of “Temps critiques,” (our dear friend of the Reseau, JW). With the communisateurs, they share the view that the crisis of the late 1960s and the beginning of the next decade heralded a new age of capitalism and its economic production of value, in which the communist revolution, or communisation, can no longer be seen, as before, in the figure of the revolutionary subject emerging in direct continuity with the antecedent vision (whether Marxist or even, for that matter, anarcho-communist).They draw the conclusion that in general the revolution can not be just a matter of proletarian class struggle. This stuates these last elements clearly outside the circle of communisateurs. JW, in particular, considers as absurd the dialectical position that supports TC's conception of the proletarian struggle as that of a fragmented class acting against its own class nature, which ties it to capitalism (I grant that “Master” Jacque's claims about R. Simon are quite thin). Even if perhaps through habits of political atavism, for my part I remain committed to the vision of revolution as the task of the class struggle, I do not think that the debate with these currents can be closed and I leave open in my own mind the problematic that they articulate.

In closing this letter, I want to add that on the theory of communisation, it is mainly the version of TC to which I refer here. This is just the beginning, and we will now continue the struggle.

Is communisation [just] a luke warm [or inconsequential] invention? At first glance, one might ask what is the originality of the communisateurs, because neither their general definition of communism nor the identification in the figure of the proletariat (and its class struggle), as the acting-subject of the revolution differ from those of classical Marxists - including those of the Left Communists. The very term communisation that these neo-Marxist little ugly ducklings use basically designates nothing else than good old communist revolution, that is to say the process of revolutionary transformation of the capitalist world in the direction of a classless society without hierarchy, without a state, an economy, and therefore without value and abstract labor, etc. Like traditional Marxists, the communisateurs in addition say that communism will not be accomplished with a magic wand (citing Bruno Astarian), in an instantaneous realization from one day to the next. I would also add that for them, the beginning of communisation, which has not yet begun, will depend on an acute crisis of capitalism, ideas that, here again, will not shock the common understanding of revolutionaries. Does the change in terminology, then, represent some kind of sectarian coquetry? Would this invention correspond to a rediscovery of luke warm water? We must clearly answer these questions not because the conception that the communisateurs have of the process of revolutionary transformation - of communisation - is actually far from that of the great vehicle of Marxism.

It must be remembered that, for the classics, the communist revolution (or communisation) takes place in necessary stages in which the accomplishment of one stage would be the condition necessary for the following one. The first step amounts to wresting the means of production from the hands of the capitalists, the second is to establish a transitional society termed "socialist", where the production and distribution of goods are socialized; at its end, begins the establishment of communism, which itself can take some time. Communism thus appears as the implementation of a program whose unfolding, in its whole duration, has been designated by Marxists as the “period of transition.”

The specific vision of communisation that the communisateurs promote clearly diverges from such a point of view. It rejects all programmatism and specifically spurns the goal of an intermdiary stage socialism (or the " lower stage of communism" to cite Marx' words). If communism is not fully realized at a single blow, the beginning of its construction, the communisateurs insist, will open from the very beginning of the revolutionary process. In fact, the goal and the path merge for them because, they say, it is directly the production of communism that destroys capitalism. And as the communist process is essentially the abolition of classes, the abolition of the capitalist social relation reciprocally linking proletarians to a class of capitalists must also immediatly occur. According to the vision of the communisateurs, the revolution is, indeed, the opposite of an affirmation of the proletariat ; it is opposed to the vision of an abolition of classes resulting in their absorption into the proletariat.

So here we perceive very clearly the gap between the communisation of the communisateurs and the Marxist advocates of the "period of transition," which undoubtedly rests on the program of the maximal affirmation of the proletariat as a prelude to its own demise. Mac Intosh relates quite faithfully the theoretical position of the communisateurs when he writes: "Communisation entails the abolition of the proletariat, the class of wage-workers, whose abstract labor is the source of value. Socialism or Communism is not the self-affirmation of the proletariat or workers' power, and the creation of a republic labor. "

Is the theory of communisation of the communisateurs legitimate? Why, after all, would it be better than the old conception of revolution? We can not even advance by claiming that the facts have demonstrated the falsity of the latter conception, because we have hitherto known only embryonic examples of a revolutionary process. On the other hand, the new theory remains to be tested.

The pioneer communisateurs in the years 1968-1975, roughly began from the conviction that the classical theory, based on the vector of the affirmation of the proletariat, was at best inadequate, at worst, wrong. For the young communisateurs, the failure of all previous revolutionary attempts, from 1871 to 1968, ocurred in the final analysis because of the non-recognition of the limits of proletarian affirmation and even because that very affirmation worked against the révolution. The communist left, and first of all certain theorists of the council communists tradition, had certainly seen that the instruments in which the Marxists usually saw the rise to power of the labor movement (unions, class parties , reformist parliamentary representation …), that is to say, the growth of proletarian affirmation, had produced just the opposite of the desired effect, but these communists stopped there by simply replacing the failed instruments with the affirmation of workers 'councils, of the self-organization of struggles, workers' autonomy, etc., retaining, therefore, what according to the communisateurs, was the source of the failure. These communisateurs, largely politically born around 1968 - as indeed many others of my generation - understood the global wave of struggles of that time as the point of rupture with "affirmationism" and the swan song of the old workers movement too.

But all that was not enough to give the new theory of communisation the true legitimacy that the mere recognition of the failure of the old vision could not bring. If a theory is false, this does not mean, in effect, that any theory that replaces it is accurate. The anti-affirmationism of the communisateurs in the immediate aftermath of "1968", expressed by the idea that the proletariat must begin to abolish itself in undertaking the revolutionary process at its outset (and in 1975 the "communist tendency" of Berard, arising from a break with the ICC also said this), contained an ambiguity at its very heart: was this a theory finally revealed in full by revolution and which could have been formulated in any revolutionary upheaval, or was this a theory could only arise on the basis of the modern development of capitalism? Admittedly, the communisateurs discovered this problem in the second half of the 1970s. They found the answer thanks to the profound restructuring of its system that capitalism initiated following the famous "oil shocks," the critical peak of the crisis of the “Fordist” mode of regulation -- on the bases of which capitalism had functioned since the 1920s - 1930's - which began around 1967. This restructuring, developed until the late 1980s, and uprooted all the bases of proletarian affirmation, explained the communisateurs. One of its main characteristics was to liquidate the "labor movement", reducing the proletarians virtually to individuals in confrontation with the powers of capitalism. Therefore, communisation according to the communisateurs appeared not so much as a better theory of revolution, but as the only possible theory that is adequate to the new era of capitalist accumulation. They presented it - and still do so today - as the revolutionary communist theory of our time, the time of a proletariat irreversibly fragmented.

The perception of fragmentation by the communisateurs differs from that of IP in that, unlike IP, the former (at least until now), do not have not a sense of the "recomposition of the workers movement," of the" labor movement "in other words.

Maxime

Paris, May 31, 2012
 

Notes

1. Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha Programme" in Karl Marx, The First International and After (Penguin Books), p. 346.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 347.

4. While Camatte’s text is largely devoted to the trajectory of the value-form based on a reading of Marx’s unpublished manuscripts (The Grundrisse, and “The Results of the Immediate Process of Production”), its chapter on “Communism and the intermediary phases between capitalism and communism,” like the Fundamental Principles of the GIK, grapples with the issue of communization. Camatte’s treatment of this issue has its own basis in texts by Mitchell (Jehan) in Bilan in the 1930’s, and especially in texts by Bordiga starting from the late 1940’s through the ‘60’s.

5. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, p.346.

6. Mattick’s picture of that abundance seems far too optimistic today, especially in light of decades of “development” based largely on the growth of fictitious capital and financial bubbles, while the reproduction of the proletariat has been violently threatened, and ever-greater masses of workers are being permanently expelled from the production process. While such questions are, indeed, important, they do not preclude a vision of revolution in which communization, understood as the abolition of the value-form and the proletarian labor to which it is yoked, cannot be put off until a higher stage or the completion of a period of transition.

7. Jacques Camatte, Capital and Community (Prism Key Press, 2011), p. 261.

8. Ibid., p. 265.

9. Ibid., p. 272.

10. Ibid., p. 266.

11. Ibid., p. 279.

12. Ibid., p.288.

13. Ibid., pp. 297-298.

14. One question that seems to be a diversion, though much ink and paper has been expended in discussing it in the pro-revolutionary milieu, is when communization, as opposed to a period of transition, became an historical possibility for the proletariat. Was communization possible in 1789, in 1848, in 1871, in 1917, in 1936, etc.? Communization did not occur then, and while we can discuss why it did not, the task today is to confront the historical necessity for communization in the present epoch, and the dangers that confront the collective worker in a capitalist world that survives its present crisis.

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Marxism: best defence against media manipulation

British broadcasters win a High Court ruling against the police, a former Murdoch editor is arrested and the Leveson ‘inquiry’ into Press Standards meanders on: JJ Gaunt peeks behind the headlines and reviews two recent books critical of the media

On an 1886 tour promoting marxism and working class organisation in America, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling took time out to ridicule and denounce the US press in general and the Chicago Times and Chicago Tribune in particular for their lynch mob coverage of the trial of eight anarchists who had been fitted up by the state of Illinois and faced execution following the infamous Haymarket bomb incident.   

More than 125 years and many technological leaps later, modern mass media remain at root little more than megaphones amplifying the ruling class’s ‘values’, its lies, its propaganda, when they are not simply selling its commodities.

Much effort is expended on the part of the ‘fourth estate’ to deny this reality and turn it on its head. Commenting on the High Court’s May 17 decision to overturn a Crown Court judge’s order to hand over unseen footage of the violent police eviction of ‘travellers’ from Dale Farm, Essex in 2011, ITN (Independent Television News) chief executive John Hardie said: "This landmark decision is a legal recognition of the separate roles of the police and independent news organisations. We fought this case on a matter of principle - to ensure that journalists and cameramen are not seen as agents of the state ...”  Lawyers for other interested parties – they included the BBC, BSkyB and Channel 5 –  had said their clients risked being seen as “coppers’ narks” (police informants) if they had complied with the original order. That would never do, as M’lud wisely agreed.

It also won’t do to have the working class and the rest of the population tune-out of the Murdoch ‘Hackgate’ scandal of criminality, bribery and corruption with the erroneous impression that the media, police and politicians are ‘all in it together’.

It’s to restore public faith in the media mafia that the Leveson Inquiry into Press Standards has been protracted long after the original British state objective of clipping Murdoch’s UK activities had been achieved. (1) With hoards of ‘witnesses’ either denouncing the ‘Evil Empire’ (viz ex-Sunday Times editor Harold Evans) or clumsily attempting to defend the indefensible (viz the testimony of the News International clan itself or the self-serving testimonies of former PM Blair and current Culture and Media Secretary Jeremy Hunt), the ‘inquiry’ has turned into a modern Inquisition to exorcise the devil Murdoch, the better to redeem the rest of the media.

In the same manner, it’s to demonstrate the state’s due ‘impartiality’ and incorruptible nature that the very particular friends of PM David Cameron -  former News International golden child Rebekah Brooks and her husband Charlie, Cameron’s old school chum - were arrested and charged with the very serious offence (with apologies to AA Milne) of perverting the course of justice. (2)

Understanding the media: Marxism not moralism

These recent events featuring the UK state and its media apparatus are of course merely moments in an historic pattern – one long recognised by critics of the capitalist system. As Marx and Engels often argued, the ruling class’s particular interests are falsely presented as those of society as a whole. It’s the primary function of mass media to reflect and reinforce the resultant ‘dominant ideology’.

This material reality is illuminated and fleshed out in a recent and recommended book called Beyond the Left: The Communist Critique of the Media by UK lecturer Dr Stephen Harper (3).

His ‘Introduction: to guide and bind the world’ grabs the subject by the kishkas: “Having abolished scarcity and made communism possible by the early twentieth century, capitalism today is an obsolete system whose continuance offers humanity only increasing misery. As the social symptoms of this retrogression – poverty, starvation, holocausts, environmental degradation and economies increasingly based upon drugs, arms and gangsterism – become more difficult to disguise, the media play a vital role, it is argued here, in concealing their systemic origins.”

To this egregious end, the 1928 publication of Propaganda by Edward Bernays, American nephew of Sigmund Freud and known variously as the ‘king of spin’ and ‘the father of public relations’, constituted “a direct response to the socio-economic impasses of US capitalism in the 1920s, as a dearth of new markets, a crisis of over-production and the lingering menace of proletarian revolution forced capitalists to devise ever more ingenious methods of mass persuasion...”

One of the media’s most enduring successes in this regard is revealed in the chapter ‘Normalising the unthinkable: news media as state propaganda’ in which Harper notes how the very notion of wage labour – once widely understood as “an outrage against humanity whose essential continuity with earlier forms of bondage found expression! in the now antiquated phrase ‘wage slavery’” - is today throughout the mainstream media “accepted as a fact of life”. “Thus, in a period of austerity, the BBC’s Sunday morning television discussion programme The Big Question asks ‘Is It Time For A Maximum Wage?’ (13 March 2010); but it cannot question the legitimacy of the wages system itself.”

Within this marxist framework, which draws on the analyses of past and present day revolutionary organisations (including the ICC and ICT) and recognises both the decadence of capitalism and the primacy of the nation state over ‘supra-national corporations’, Harper’s other chapters include ‘Not neoliberalism: why the state is still the enemy’; ‘Blaming the victims, eroding solidarity: two media discourses on immigration’; ‘”The only honourable course’’: the media and ‘humanitarian’ war’ and ‘Beyond the news: popular culture against the working class’.

Under such headings he utilises the insights of social critics, media researchers and academics from Althusser to Žižek whilst acknowledging their limitations: Harper both quotes approvingly from Herman and Chomsky’s seminal Manufacturing Consent (1998) while roundly denouncing Chomsky for “the statism of his concrete political attachments” (today, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez; yesterday, North Vietnam’s Stalinist Vietcong).

Before dissecting specific events and gauging what the ruling class accomplished from them (the chapter ‘Bogeyman at the BBC: Nick Griffin, Question Time and the ‘fascist threat’’ is exemplary in this regard) Harper insists that “The power of media propaganda to shape our perceptions of the most fundamental aspects of our lives is exercised neither haphazardly nor clumsily”, thus underlining that the bourgeoisie acts consciously against the proletariat, its potential gravedigger.

For the working class, the author insists that there’s nothing to choose between different media ‘slants’: “...the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels ... was excited by the BBC’s ability to maintain the trust of the British public and to have secured a worldwide reputation for the British media as ‘honest, free and truthful.’ Goebbels understood that this made the BBC the perfect propaganda vehicle. Today, as then, the left-liberal media act not as a foil to capitalism but as its last ditch defence, preventing those who reject conservative political positions from accessing or developing radical ideas. In fact, right-wing and left-wing media can be argued to work not in opposition to each other, but in tandem.”

The role of the media and the ‘pluralistic’ division of labour within it as cheerleaders of imperialist war and mystifiers of the gravity of today’s ecological crisis are also explored and expanded upon. For communists and activists of all stripes, Harper’s work is both required reading and an encouraging sign that proletarian perspectives are today spreading to and being embellished by wider layers of society.

Critical criticism required

Another book – there’s a veritable overproduction of them! – attempting to critique the media is NEWSPEAK in the 21^st Century (4), a title recalling George Orwell’s 1984, a satire of mind control by an omnipresent state apparatus.  This work also insists that media such as newspapers – including and particularly those which claim to be ‘independent’, ‘left’ or just righteous and liberal – all owe their origins, development and continued survival as vehicles for corporate advertisers on whose revenue they depend and whose patronage they cannot truly offend. Similarly, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has since its foundation in the 1920s been first and foremost an obedient servant of the state’s overall interests as it demonstrated in the 1926 national strike and ever since.

The work is penned by two co-editors of a an organisation called Media Lens which challenges journalists, editors and broadcasters to justify their censorship, sins of omission and downright war-mongering, while providing e-mails to subscribers which highlight examples of the media’s latest outrages.

Indeed, NEWSPEAK reminds us all that facts are not ‘sacred’ but chosen according to taste and ideology while ‘objectivity’ is a nonsense – “nothing is neutral”. In addition it provides a salutary reminder of the depth and extent of the lies, dissembling and patriotic cheerleading around the build-up to the ‘allied’ invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation. It recalls how, as “a shoal of fish instantly changes direction ... as though the movement was synchronised by some guiding hand,” British journalists “all trained and selected for obedience by media all seeking to maximise profits within state capitalist society ... appeared [in 1999] to conclude independently that war on Serbia was a rational, justified response to a ‘genocide’ in Kosovo that had not in fact taken place. In 2002-03, many journalists concluded that war was necessary to tackle an Iraqi threat that did not exist. And yet, to our knowledge, in 2009, not a single journalist proposed military action in response to Israel’s staggering, very visible crimes against the besieged civilian population of Gaza.” The authors demonstrate how the media is again banging the drum for what they say is to be ‘the West’s’ next imperialist adventure: the bombing and possible invasion of Iran.

Similarly, this well-researched and documented work points out the staggering hypocrisy of media demanding ‘action’ over climate chaos as they carry adds promoting cheap flights, powerful motor cars and oil company claims to be forging a ‘cleaner, greener, fossil fuel-free future’.

However, such valid observations are undermined by NEWSPEAK’s own contradictions: despite declaring that ‘democracy’ is “a charade serving privilege and power” its description of the Iraqi slaughter as “an illegal war of aggression” (aren’t all wars ‘aggressive’ and exactly what’s with the fetish of bourgeois legality?); the references to ‘consumerism’ rather than capitalism; to ‘the people’ rather than the working class, etc, speak of an incoherence which ultimately favours the status quo.  Equally problematic is the tendency to deal with countries, rather than classes. For example, irrespective of the nuclear issue (the pretext for ‘the West’s’ aggression towards Iran), there’s no mention of the Tehran regime’s own regional imperialist aims and incursions, while the praise lavished by the authors on the state machine of Venezuela’s Chávez is frankly an embarrassment.

These and other elements indicate a set of analyses that fall within the framework of capitalist social relations as do the proposed solutions: the alleged need for ‘awareness, compassion and honest journalism.’  They are not truly radical because they do not go to the roots of the issue. Let’s end with Stephen Harper: “... the radical task is not to ‘work with’ the media industries and their regulatory bodies in order to campaign for ‘better’ media representations of the working class, or to defend so-called ‘public service’ media organisations against the encroachments of the market, but – through what Marx called ‘ruthless criticism’ – to expose the ruses of capitalism’s representational apparatuses until such time as they can be overthrown.”

JJ Gaunt 6/12

Footnotes

1. See Murdoch scandal: The lies of the rich and famous in World Revolution 347, 2011, http://en.internationalism.org/wr/347/ni-murdoch-scandal
2. Whether this well-connected couple will actually experience any substantial jail time is another matter.
3. Beyond the Left: The Communist Critique of the Media, by Dr Stephen Harper, published by Zero Books, 2010, ISBN: 978 1 84694 976 0 Harper’s media criticism blog ‘Relative Autonomy’ can be accessed at http://www.relativeautonomy.com/
4. NEWSPEAK in the 21^st Century by David Edwards and David Cromwell, published by Pluto Press, 2009, ISBN: 978 0 7453 2893 5 Media Lens can be accessed at http://www.medialens.org/

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Report on the Manchester Meeting of the CWO

The document that follows (Beyond Protest) is based on the notes of the introductory speaker for the CWO’s Manchester meeting on April 21. The meeting was also attended by members of the ICC and the Anarchist Federation as well as individual council communists and left communists.

The meeting was held in a fraternal manner with all seriously trying to grapple with the problem of the development of a wider class movement. The ICC comrade who replied first quoted extensively from the editorial in the last Revolutionary Perspectives (60) and stated that the ICC fully supported the introduction. He also agreed with the criticism of the democratist illusions of Occupy and emphasised the fact that it is only the international working class which can make the revolution. He also stressed that the working class still had to break out of union dominated ideology to face up to the crisis of today. He took heart from the Unilever strike analysed in RP60 as it was a place he knew well where paternalism had dominated the workforce for generations so it was good to see that even here workers were beginning to see through the system’s ideology.

A Manchester comrade then took up the point about how the working class which has no property to defend can materially alter its consciousness in the current situation and this became the main focus of much of the rest of the discussion. He argued that workers in struggle tended to reinforce their own embedding within the system and thus their struggles did not tend to develop their consciousness in a more general way. He gave the example of Greece where, despite the draconian cuts they had not yet found a way to resist. The only sign he had seen was that some people had started to take over hospitals but even this was fraught with problems. In Britain he pointed to the fact that the TUC is already using the idea of “solidarity” to get workers to accept some cuts.

Against this rather depressing view the meeting agreed that it was a real question sincerely posed but various comrades countered it by putting forward the notion that the acquisition of class consciousness was a process and we were only at the “starting line” as one comrade put it. Others pointed to the past history of the workers’ movement that just when the working class is written off as a historical force it suddenly proves everyone including revolutionaries wrong. The example of 1914 when the working class marched off in universal support for imperialist war only to begin the greatest revolutionary wave in history less than three years later stood out as an example of how class consciousness can be changed by material circumstances. In the current crisis the cuts had still yet to really hit home and all past indicators suggest that there is no immediate reaction to such things but only after a time lag when the actual burden of the new situation builds up.

In the meantime it was the task for revolutionaries to not only generalise any struggle but to point the way forward in the line of march towards greater class actions. Whilst some comrades were more eloquent in expressing a militant hatred of the capitalist system and its consequences which they could hardly wait to be ended the meeting agreed that class consciousness would be developed gradually through the increasing alienation from a system which could do nothing but attack us. It was also agreed that revolutionary consciousness would not arise overnight and that a degree of patience would be required. Class consciousness could not be developed by the revolutionary minority through a mere act of will. If there was a low level of class consciousness generally there was not a lot revolutionaries can do (as the last 40 years prove). As the Committee of Intesa wrote back in 1925 you cannot build a revolutionary movement “through expedients and tactical manoeuvres”. The sorry history of Trotskyism since 1938 is evidence enough for that.

There were also a couple of discussions which could be described as nominalist. The first was over the question of “party” and “revolutionary minority”. Whilst the ICT was quite happy to use the term “party” in terms of a class conscious political organisation it was recognised that for some (following Ruhle et al) the term had negative connotations given the experiences of the last revolutionary wave. Similarly the idea of “intervention” was a word imported from Italian and French comrades where it is common to describe any one individual’s contribution, but in English gives the unfortunate impression of someone speaking from outside the class. In both cases it was concluded that it is not so much the word but the idea behind it that was important and like our idea of “communism” itself such terms would always require explanation in order to clarify their content.

The only minor disagreement was when an ICC comrade said that things were changing and you would not have got the Communist Left addressing some sectors of internationalist anarchism ten years ago as today. The CWO comrades pointed out that they had worked with anarchists for twenty years in anti-parliamentary campaigns and No War But the Class War. The key dividing line in the current period was more about accepting an anti-capitalist revolutionary agenda and rejection of all types of reformism put forward by the left of capitalism. Whilst the Communist Left organisations were all agreed on this the problem was that not all anarchists understood this.

However this was minor issue in what was a positive meeting undertaken in a comradely spirit and we hope that future meetings will not only welcome more participants but also carry this level of discussion further.

Beyond Protest Manchester

For those of us who have dedicated almost all their adult lives to struggling for a movement which to bring about proletarian emancipation these are suddenly interesting times. Obviously they are not yet interesting times for most of the working class or there would be more people here to discuss how we can go “Beyond Protest” but there is no doubt that the speculative bubble which had been swelling for more than two decades until it burst in 2007-8 has been a major shock to the capitalist system, revealing it for what it truly is.

The collapse did not come as a shock to us. A young American sympathiser recently got back in touch with us on our website and reminded us what we wrote to him in December 2006.

“The current speculative bubble which is distorting real capital values cannot last forever, and if the system goes through a new global crash, the working class will need to have organised instruments in place in order to fight the authoritarian barbaric solutions which the capitalists will themselves put forward.”

Well it is still early in this crisis to yet see outright barbarism but what is going on in Syria is not far off it. However we should also point out that this crisis did not start in 2007 or 2008 but when we older comrades were young. It was the end of the post-war boom that brought our generation into the communist movement. More precisely it was the resistance of the working class to that crisis in the lat 60s and early 70s which encouraged us not to join the traditional left but to found in Britain at least a new communist movement.

The key facts of the last 4 decades are that capitalism despite trying Keynesianism, monetarism and neo-liberalism has been unable to get out of its stagnation. This has been because to really start a new round of accumulation it would need destroy an enormous amount of value. But to do this it would have to inflict austerity the like of which we have not seen since the Thirties and which would provoke social confrontations to threaten the system or else a new global war would do the trick excerpt the consequences for the capitalist are so incalculable in the era of nuclear weapons that this too would threaten their long term survival (and that is all they think about bugger the rest of us). The speculative bubble based on massive debt was their last trick and now that has burst the prospects for capitalism are indeed dire. Indeed we can currently see no other future for it but more of the same – stagnation, austerity, bailing out the banks to keep the system ticking over. Even the Governor of the B of E is talking of a lost decade. Lenin said there was no situation which capitalism could not get out of but the current situation is a bigger impasse than any we have seen so far. Managed decline is the course that has been chosen in the Micawberish hope that something will turn up. In the meantime speculation is once again being rehabilitated (but on commodities and currencies and not on housing and real estate).

The only other policy they have got is austerity – cuts upon cuts. We have already seen plenty of these. Everyone has there own favourite stats on the crisis but the ones we have printed in our latest Aurora from various sources give us a flavour.

“According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies:

•This year’s tax changes mean the ‘average family’ will lose £511 per year.

•A nominal increase in the minimum wage will leave it lower in real terms than it was in 2004. The government has taken the Low Pay Commission’s advice to freeze the minimum wage for young people from October. [£4.98 per hour for18-20 year olds, £3.68 for16-17 yr olds above school leaving age but under 18. The ‘apprentice rate’, for under 19s or 19+ and in the first year of apprenticeship will rise by 5p to £2.65 per hour.]

•Inflation has also outstripped average income growth, leaving workers worse off in real terms. The Institute forecasts that real net income of the average household will be lower in 2015-16 than in 2002-3.

Meanwhile the TUC estimates:

•By April 2013 families on working tax credit may lose more than £4,000 from changes to the credit system while 1.6m council workers will have their pay frozen for a third year in a row.

Consumer Focus estimates:

•4 million people have a Pay Day loan. A ‘typical’ monthly repayment on £100 is about £130 but higher interest rates, up to 5,000% p.a. are far from unknown. Tony Hobman, chief executive of the Money Advice Service, a government agency to help people in debt, is paid £250,000 a year before bonuses.

The ‘Institute of Health Equity’ at UCL reports:

•The gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest has widened in most areas of England. The largest gap is for males in Westminster where average life expectancy of the richest is 84 but for the poorest the average is 16.9 years less.

The ONS latest employment figures show:

•The drop in unemployment is entirely due to the growth in part-time work.”

And on top of this we have to realise that over 90% of the planned cuts have not yet hit us.

Little wonder that we have seen movements like the Occupy and Indignados taking to the streets in scores of countries across the world. And little wonder that the bosses paper the FT keeps writing articles wondering at how they are getting away with it without greate social unrest. The important thing about the Occupy movement more than anything else is that it has raised a political agenda. Everyone now talks about “capitalism”. 5 years ago it was only the “nutters” of the Communist Left who used that kind of archaic language. And this is important since we can have al the economic struggles you like but unless they raise a political dimension they are something the system can accept and cope with. The Occupy movement has also questioned the hierarchical nature of society and its structures. Its open forums have shown how discussions can increase people’s confidence and widen their horizons. Our comrades have been able to participate in them in various countries. In Rome for example our comrades have been asked to organise a school of Marxism so that people read Capital in an attempt to understand the real crisis.

However before it sounds like we are getting over-enthusiastic about the Occupy and Indignados movements we also have to recognise their limitations. On a political level, the ‘anti-capitalism’ of Occupy, like the Occupy movement itself, has no coherency or substance. When questioned about the meaning of anti-capitalism most Occupy protesters would say they are against the banks and multinational corporations. But there is no economic critique of capitalism and no understanding of why capitalism will inevitably create these hated institutions. The Occupy Wall Street website states on its home page:

OWS is fighting back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations. The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to fight back against the richest 1% of people that are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future.

This sort of reformist perspective to ‘democratise capitalism’ in line with groups like UK Uncut who think that capitalism could be fair if only the government made the bourgeoisie pay their taxes, seems to be as close as the Occupy movement gets to having any political perspective at all. Such demands for a fair and democratic capitalism are rooted in petty bourgeois utopianism and serve only to peddle illusions about what is possible under capitalism, illusions that the working class must dispel if it is ever to wage an effective struggle against capital.

This brings us to the question of class. This is an issue that the Occupy movement chooses to gloss over, or perhaps even to deliberately obscure. Of course the inequality that exists in society is at the heart of what the Occupy movement opposes, but this is conceptualised in terms of the 1% of those that own and control the world’s wealth, compared to the 99% who don’t. This may be graphic representation of that inequality but it is just presented as a given, the consequence perhaps of the power of greedy bankers or megalomaniac multi-nationals. The fundamental point that capitalism is a class society based on the exploitation of the proletarian majority by the bourgeois minority is neatly overlooked, as this would undermine the Occupy movement’s utopian demands for a fair and democratic capitalism. Those who hold a Marxist understanding of the need for a revolutionary transformation of society led by the working class as the prime agent of change recognise that ther is no such thing as a fair and democratic capitalism.

So what is to be done?

The working class owns only the individual capacity to labour. It has no system of property to defend. For previous rising classes the question of revolutionary change was no problem. All they had to do was defend their form of property in every way they could and they coalesced into a movement which challenged the old order. The bourgeoisie in their struggle could even engender slogans which made it appear as though they we re fighting for all humanity (liberty, fraternity and equality). What they didn’t tell the workers was that equality was only for those who could afford it. In bourgeois society Orwell’s nostrum that some are more equal than others is a daily fact.

The only other weapon the working class possesses is its consciousness. This is nurtured and formed by its own struggles from its position in capitalist society but these sparks of consciousness rise now here now there and then die with the struggle. How can the perceptions of workers in struggle be carried from one point to the next? Marx was aware of the problem. He knew that the emancipation of the working class was “the task of the workers themselves” yet he also wrote that under capitalist conditions the ruling ideas are those who own the means of production, including intellectual production.

How to escape the dilemma – the political party.

The solution to the dilemma lies in the formation of a revolutionary minority or party if you like. This turns the consciousness of those individuals within the working class who already see what is at stake into a material force. A material force which fights within the wider working class to increase both the depth and the extent of its class consciousness. This revolutionary minority is entirely consistent with Marx’s own vision of a future international party. Many people quote Marx’s insertion into the rules of the IWMA in 1864 the nostrum that “the emancipation of the working class will be the task of the workers themselves”. What they usually claim is that this shows that Marx was against the idea of a revolutionary minority altogether. But this is an error. After all why would Marx include this in the rules of the International if it was an anti-party statement. What he meant here was that the workers had to forge their own organisations independent of all the bourgeois parties. Without an organisation representing the historic acquisitions of the working class the bourgeoisie will be capable of imposing its own solution on any movement however militant.

However Marx could not have envisaged all the false starts that the workers movement would make on its road to emancipation.

The revolutionary minority we have in mind will have to be unlike any other produced in the past. In the first place it will not fall into the social democratic error of trying to have a mass party which can only be achieved by capitulating to the immediate demands for reform and take on a parliamentary agenda.

Professional revolutionaries are not the answer either. This was advocated by Lenin for the Bolshevik Party when it was clandestine and under the brutal Tsarist dictatorship. He wanted revolutionaries to be “professional” in sense of not being bunglers who betrayed themselves and the workers to the secret police. We are against it for several historical reasons. Having party organisers who are employees mean they can be disciplined by the mere act of cutting their source of salary as Gramsci did to defeat the Italian Left majority in the Communist Party of Italy in the 1920s. However there is also another profound reason for not accepting this model and that is that the class party has to be a party of the class and the members remain with the class either in the workplace or in the community.

There were some good things about Bolshevism: before 1917 it was obviously an organisation which not only had a wide ranging debate but encouraged individual initiative at the local level and within workers’ organisations. It was its roots inside the working class established well before the revolution that were the key to its decision to drop its social democratic programme in April 1917.

Obviously though the next revolution will not be a rerun of the revolutionary wave of 90 years ago. Obviously too we have to learn from the errors of the revolutionaries of the past.

We have catalogued those of the Bolsheviks many times. On Day One Sovnarkom was set up which was really just a bourgeois cabinet with another name. The real revolutionary ruling body should have been the Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets. Other examples are well-known. In June-July 1918 soviet elections in Petrograd were rigged for the first time and the isolation of the revolution and the continuing social democratic ideas about socialism which still lingered in Bolshevism ensured by 1921 that the class had disappeared and the party was the class. Anarchists have used these errors to argue that all along Bolshevism was a plot to defeat the spontaneous revolution of the working class. But the anarchists themselves lacked cohesion and organisation – personalities rather than polices dominated. When the Bolsheviks rigged the Petrograd soviet elections in 1918 it was to keep out the reaction not to prevent a move to a third revolution. And this is why some anarchist alter recognised that they had failed too and decided that they too needed organisation and a Platform which they produced in 1926. This remains controversial amongst anarchists, even to this day, but it is a recognition that a revolutionary minority is needed. And today the Anarchist Federation carries in its paper an outline of revolutionary action and organisation that is not too distant from our own. Similarly we have read on the ICC website of a group called the Birov Collective which calls itself anarcho-syndicalist but it s ideas of syndicates are very close to ours of workplace groups as both are essentially political in character (this contrast with the Solidarity Federation in the UK) . Today the debate is not between Anarchism and Marxism but between revolutionaries from both camps and the traditional left which are all based on the restoration in one form or another of social democracy.

From the Russian Revolution we take the lessons that to make the revolution the class will have to create a rev minority which is the material expression of it consciousness. That minority will fight in the class wide organs for the communist programme but being a minority it cannot wield power. As Onorato Damen wrote in the platform of the PCInt after the break with Bordiga “the working class does not delegate its power to any one not even its class party”. And the revolutionary minority has other tasks than to rule in any one geographical area – spreading the world revolution takes precedence and if its members are elected to posts of responsibility they are elected on the same basis as other delegates i.e. revocably.

Today we are seeing the beginning of a revival of an anti-capitalist consciousness. It is only a beginning but those of us who have been fighting for a revolutionary class outcome all our lives have an enormous responsibility to the new generation. Up to now communist have separated over issues largely of historical creation. Past errors have become current shibboleths. Rather than a source of understanding history has largely been a nightmare weighing on the living and magnifying differences which are hardly ever properly explored. Today we are on the edge of new situation and we need to re-examine our practices. We have been saying for many months that the issue is not just to fight the cuts but to fight the system that produces them. This is the starting point for all revolutionaries and we have declared ourselves willing to work with anyone who shares that basic premise. Out of common work comes common respect, out of respect comes real dialogue, and out of that a more effective working class resistance.

Jock

Monday, June 11, 2012

<출처> http://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2012-06-11/report-on-the-manchester-meeting-of-the-cwo

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진보의 남용

-오세철

모든 일이 한꺼번에 벌어져 난마처럼 얽혀 있다. 한편에서 통합진보당 당원명부 압수수색이 방송 매체의 화면을 뒤덮는 동안, 다른 한편에선 ‘노동해방실천연대’ 사회주의자들의 국가보안법 위반 혐의 긴급체포가 언론의 주목을 받지 못하고 이루어졌다. 그런가 하면 22명의 쌍용차 노동자의 죽음을 추모하는 국민대회를 연 대책위를 사법처리하겠다는 검경의 엄포가 쌍용차 노동자들을 두 번 죽이고 있다.

이것이 자유민주주의 국가를 소리 높여 외쳐대는 이른바 선진자본주의 국가 대한민국의 벌거벗은 모습이다. 그 틈을 비집고 이명박 정권 말기의 공안정국을 향한 발톱이 다시 흉측하게 드러나고 있으며, 보수·진보 언론을 막론하고 시대착오적인 진보재구성 논쟁이 사람들의 눈과 귀를 막고 있다.

이 모든 사태의 본질은 무엇인가? 그것은 역사적이고 상대적 의미를 갖는 ‘진보’ 개념을 상투적으로 남용하는 문제이고, 형식으로서의 절차적 민주주의와 내용으로서의 실질적 민주주의를 분리하는 비변증법적 관념론의 문제이다. 마르크스가 160여년 전 <공산주의선언>을 썼을 때, 그는 자본주의를 진보적이라고 보았다. 그러면서도 자유로운 개인이 연합하는 새로운 생산양식의 건설을 인류의 물질적 필연성으로 보았다. 1차 세계대전을 정점으로 쇠퇴하는 자본주의를 넘어서는 길목에서 혁명가와 노동계급은 “사회주의냐, 전쟁이냐”를 외쳤다. 그리고 100년이 지난 지금 세계자본주의는 그 모순이 극에 달해 ‘야만인가’ ‘사회주의인가’를 선택해야 하는 운명에 놓여 있다. 자본주의 쇠퇴라는 객관적 사실과 노동계급의 억압을 뚫고 솟구치는 투쟁을 목도하면서 한가롭게 진보를 외치거나 새로운 진보를 내세우는 것은 손바닥으로 하늘을 가리는 일이다.

민족주의는 사회주의와 대립한다. 1차 세계대전 당시 독일 사회주의세력이 조국의 깃발을 들고 전쟁터에 수많은 노동자들을 몰아넣어 살해했을 때, 그 후 나치즘과 스탈린주의가 ‘사회주의’ 탈을 쓰고 노동계급을 억압·착취했을 때, 민족주의는 노동계급의 국제주의를 가로막는 반혁명적 이데올로기가 됐다. 통합진보당은 강령에서 사회주의를 삭제함으로써 스스로 ‘진보’의 깃발을 내렸기 때문에 우리는 그들을 진보라 부르지 않는다. 비당권파가 사회민주주의적 색깔을 일부 지녔다고 해도 그들 역시 진보로 부르기 어렵다. 민족주의와 사회민주주의는 동전의 양면이기 때문이다.

일부 진보논객이 ‘민족해방’과 ‘노동해방’을 말하는 세력을 민주주의를 외면하는 추상적 혁명주의로 매도하는 논거와 태도는 두 가지 점에서 해괴한 논리다. 첫째, 민족주의는 21세기 자본주의 체제 내에서 더 이상 혁명주의가 아니다. 민족주의는 오히려 자본주의를 공고히 해 왔고, 파시즘의 위험을 내재하고 있기 때문이다. 둘째, 부르주아 민주주의와 노동자 민주주의는 전혀 다른 개념이고 대립한다는 사실이다. 혁명주의는 형식적 민주절차만 강조하는 부르주아 독재에 반대하고 형식과 내용이 통일되는 노동자 민주주의를 옹호한다. 이번 통진당 사태는 노동자 민주주의를 저버렸다는 점에서 비판받아 마땅하고 혁명주의와는 아무런 관련도 없음을 밝혀야 한다.

물론 우리는 사상의 자유, 표현의 자유를 억압하는 희대의 악법인 국가보안법의 폐지를 주장한다. 모든 공안 탄압을 반대하고 맞서 싸워야 한다. 그렇다고 선거를 통해 의회에 진출하려는 정치세력의 선거부정을 묵과해서는 안된다. 오히려 우리는 밑으로부터의 직접민주주의를 실현하며 막바지에 다다른 자본주의를 근본적으로 넘어서는 새로운 사회의 건설로 나아가야 한다. 이른바 ‘진보의 재구성’이란 이름으로 개량주의와 혁명주의를 구분하고 자본주의의 틀 안에 노동계급을 가두는 개량주의를 넘어서는 혁명적 실천을 모색할 때다.

<경향신문 오피니언 기고>

본문

The Eurozone Crisis:There is an Alternative but it is not on Any Electoral List

The British Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson once famously remarked that a week is a long time in politics. And indeed it is amazing how quickly the capitalist class can forget. Take how the current phase of the crisis really started. If you read the financial commentators or listen to politicians in any country today, whether in the UK, US or Europe itself you would think the world crisis of capitalism was due to workers living it up in luxurious welfare states that now can’t be paid for!

Political and Economic Paralysis in Europe Continues

From Greece to Portugal via Italy and Spain the Southern European debt crisis is put down to lazy workers and tax-dodging petty bourgeois. To hammer this home numerous journals have printed quotations from “a (usually anonymous) worker” agreeing that “we all lived beyond our means”. They seem to have forgotten that it was the bursting (initially in the US) of a financial bubble created by bonus-bagging bankers and financiers that started it all. The banks and big financial institutions had to be bailed out by the state because they were “too big to fail”. It was this bailout which saddled the governments of Europe (and not just Europe) with their current “unsustainable” borrowing costs.

But even this does not get to the root cause of the crisis. States everywhere bailed out the financial system in order to save the entire capitalist order. The last twenty years of financial speculation came about because the whole system was already in deep crisis. This was a crisis of accumulation of capital which began in the 1970s. When other “solutions” like nationalisation and deficit financing failed to re-start accumulation to the post-war boom levels the capitalist crisis could only take one course. It evolved in traditional fashion towards speculation which Marx frequently equated with “swindling” in Capital Volume III.[1]

But speculating on the basis of arbitrary values attached to “assets” which were only assets on paper could only be sustained by the pretence that this fictitious capital was actually based on real production values. In fact it was based on a mountain of debt which extended down to the least capable of paying it in society.

This, paradoxically, was a useful alibi when the crash came. It made it so much easier to play on the “we are all in this together” lie. And haven’t our masters done well? After four years of increasing austerity to “bring down the debt” global banking debt has not substantially shrunk. According to the Bank of International Settlements, it remains at $22,347,200,000,000 [see bis.org] nor has the speculative trade in so-called derivatives. Indeed the latter (which are a form of hedging against future losses) continues to grow. In June 2009 total contracts were valued at $594.5 trillion but for the latest quarter for which data are available this is now $707,569, 000,000,000. [See bis.org]. It is not just bankers’ bonuses which have been safeguarded by state intervention but the whole game of financial speculation itself. The derivative debts are not only not unwinding but have expanded by $100 trillions in the last six months alone. This is more extreme in some states than in others.

As always the Anglo-Saxons continue to play hardest in the financial game with the UK being the only large state in the EU to increase banking debts in the last year. As Robert Peston affirmed at the end of last year

One other slightly surprising and - perhaps - disturbing trend is that the debt of financial institutions has risen, from 205% of GDP to 210% of GDP.[2]

And UK capitalism can do little else. Having drastically reduced the manufacturing sector to a point where it counts for only an eighth of GDP it is desperately reliant on the financial sector if it is to get any GDP growth. And this is why the eurozone crisis hits home here too. If the Eurozone economy stagnates how can the British banking sector find new financial and speculative games to play (or “provide banking services” as the British ruling class like to call it)? [3]

Add to that the debt question. Amongst the so-called PIIGS the UK has not much exposure to Greek or Spanish debt but is very exposed to Portuguese and Irish debt. If they default (and both survive on IMF and Eurozone handouts) then the British banking sector will also arrive at an absolutely unsustainable point. And rising debt in relation to GDP is unstoppable as far as the richer economies of the world are concerned. According to a recent report on ‘deleveraging’ (i.e. reducing debt):

Total debt has actually grown across the world’s ten largest mature economies since the 2008–09 financial crisis, due mainly to rising government debt. Moreover, the

ratio of total debt to GDP has declined in only three countries in our sample:

the United States, South Korea, and Australia.

In terms of percentage of GDP to debt the UK tops the world’s debt league. UK aggregate debt has now gone beyond 500% of GDP, closely followed by Japan. For Spain the percentage is over 300%.[4]

The Capitalist Choice

And to try to get these under control they have only one policy. It is to make the working class pay in cuts in welfare, health spending, wages, pensions and jobs. But as we wrote in Revolutionary Perspectives 59

Austerity is resulting precisely in the opposite of what was intended*[5]*

As the working class are thrown out of work, as welfare is cut so the economy contracts and government revenues diminish and so borrowing increases. The debts of the all countries, but particularly the so-called PIIGS, continues to rise and only further debt forgiveness and international bailouts will be needed.

Meanwhile the agony for millions increases daily. The latest unemployment figures given in the Guardian [1.5.2012] show that:

Across the European Union, there are now 24.7 million men and women out of work.

Within the eurozone, the youth unemployment rate jumped to 22.1% from 20.6%, with 3.345m adults under the age of 25 out of work.

ADD GRAPH[S]

Spain and Greece have unemployment amongst under 25s of over 50%. Even in Italy it has reached 36%. And this is official. What would it be like if all those in temporary, casual and part-time work were taken into account? Given that the general forecast is for this to last a decade we are looking at a lost generation. On top of that across Europe millions of families have reached a desperate situation with some families drowning under debt which continues to mount. Suicides are already on the increase in Greece and Italy in particular.[6] In Greece the average fall in family income over the last four years has been at 30%. Many families with children have only ?10 a day to spend on food and many will never get out of debt.[7]

The total bankruptcy (if we can be forgiven the irony) of the cuts policy has dented the confidence of the apostles of austerity. Amongst the global ruling class what could be described as the neo-Keynesians are making a comeback. Headed by economists like James Krugman and Larry Summers they are now pointing to the futility of current policy and calling for “stimulus”. And, taking their tone from this, the social democrats, in Britain and France particularly, are pretending they have a new policy to soften the blow of austerity. To many debt-laden and poverty-stricken workers who are totally cynical about the political establishment it seems a worth a try. It cannot be worse than the present.

It is however based on sand and in any case in real terms is not an alternative. The foundations of Keynesianism is deficit financing. The state borrows money (or just prints it) to invest now in projects which create jobs for workers who are then able to give a boost to spending (the so-called multiplier effect) and we get the magical growth. What this forgets is that historically Keynesian policies have only been applied after years of austerity have got down government borrowing. Now however the states are all saddled with so much debt how can they launch a policy for growth based on further deficit financing? These states will find it difficult to finance some of their borrowing through bonds issues to investors (i.e. big financial institutions) who are already running scared of sovereign debt! As it is they are already pursuing a policy of quantitative easing (printing money) just to give to the banks to keep the system going. Once this sort of money gets into circulation then the Merkel Weimar inflation nightmare will be the reality.

Bankrupt Policies on Offer

In fact, the politicians like Ed Balls and Francois Holland who are offering “change” or to do something different, are only offering to postpone austerity for a year or so longer than their right wing opponents. The idea of launching a policy for growth via the financing (on borrowed or printed money) of new infrastructure will only exacerbate the problem. In truth every segment of our ruling class has no better policy for getting out of the capitalist mess we are in than Charles Dickens’ Wilkins Micawber. But desperate voters will probably buy into it. Labour’s success in the local elections in the UK (albeit 7 out of 10 voters did not even go to the polls) and Hollande’s victory in the French Presidential elections are both signs of this. But nothing will change for workers as a result.

Down the road more desperate solutions are on offer. The extreme right is on the rise proposing “simple” if illusory solutions. For them unemployment and falling earnings are not consequences of the failure of the capitalist system but due to the European Union and immigration. In the Greek situation our comrades have already raised the alarm over the rise of xenophobic and ultra-nationalist alliances which have sprung up as the crisis is increasingly portrayed as one “Made in Germany”.[8] The likes of Golden Dawn in Greece which has now entered parliament for the first time (with 21 seats), Geert Wilders party in the Netherlands and, not least, the National Front in France have all stepped up the anti-immigrant and anti-EU message. In Greece the thugs of Golden Dawn, like the Nazis they ape, will start to make life more hellish for immigrants than it is already. The more subtle Marine Le Pen hopes to build on Sarkozy’s failure by splitting his party over the issues of immigration and crime in order to make the National Front the main party of the right. Playing the “national” card comes naturally for our ruling class. The “we are all in it together” and sacrifices are needed for the “good of the country” messages are all aimed at diverting attention away from the fact that the working class are paying for the ruling class to continue enjoying the fruits of our exploitation. No doubt the political climate will get nastier. Our Greek comrades have tried to counteract this growing nationalism with an appeal to both German and Greek workers. This has been distributed in its thousands and has been well-received in factories in Germany.[9] The leaflet shows that the working class in Germany have already paid and are still paying for the “economic miracle”.

The other side of the German “economic miracle” of the last decade are the shrinking wages of the population dependent on employment, because they have paid and are still paying the price of “improving the competitiveness” of the German economy. Real wages of German workers are falling year by year and companies’ profits “inflate” constantly. Purchasing power is now well below inflation. 7 million (about 20% of the workforce) work part-time under fixed-term contracts (“mini-jobs”), with monthly earnings below 400 euros and without insurance. While real wages have declined over the last 10 years, banks have increased their profits by 39%.

And this is what the ruling class everywhere want for us all. Take the following piece on the eve of the French Presidential election from Josef Joffe in the Financial Times [3 May]

Francois Hollande is odds-on favourite to win the French Presidency, a bleak prospect for all but new Keynesians and old socialists. … he should take the lead from his fellow social democrat, Gerhard Schröder.

Why the former German chancellor? Because he dared tell his own electorate what neither Mr Hollande nor Nicholas Sarkozy would have uttered even on the rack. Nine years ago, Mr Schröder warned his country: reduce social benefits, loosen up labour markets and accept individual responsibility – or else. Then he carried through with his “Agenda 2010”. And lo, Germany went from zero to 3 per cent growth in the two years before the crash – and back to 3 per cent thereafter.[10]

Today German workers are no better off but the mass of surplus value they create has given weapons for the likes of Merkel to use in trying to force through more austerity. And as our comrades point out the problem is the same everywhere.

Elections or Real Change?

Since the crisis broke 4 years ago twelve governments in the major capitalist states have been replaced including those in Greece and France this month (May 2012).

Elections, as the article from a French comrade which follows this makes clear, are only the means by which the ruling class get us to give them legitimacy. By nominally choosing our rulers we become accomplices in what they do to us. The options on offer from our rulers are increasingly narrowing. For us the electoral choice the capitalist class offers is like that of the concentration camp – either death by overwork or through starvation. Greek workers have naturally tried to avoid such a choice as the election results there showed. Despite it being illegal not to vote more than a third of the electorate did not do so. Those that did vote (in contrast to France) massively abandoned the social democrats of PASOK for those left parties who oppose the deal with the EU. Hollande won in France for promising to renegotiate the European stability pact but PASOK was almost wiped out for accepting the EU terms for its bailout.

That apart the Greek election result gave no clear indication as to a course of action for the Greek ruling class. Indeed the stand-off in Greece is almost a metaphor for the whole world economy. The difference is that Greeks are already experiencing what we will all face in years to come. In fact the Greek elections only confirm! the economic and political impasse of capitalism today. The state of the crisis has led to heavy losses for the two parties of the coalition which negotiated the austerity package with the EU and IMF. Despite the peculiarities of the Greek parliamentary system which gives the leading party 50 extra seats PASOK and New Democracy have fallen two MPs short of being able to form a government to carry on with the EU deal. In fact it would be a travesty if they had been able to achieve it as 7 out 10 of those that did vote gave their votes to parties which campaigned against the deal.

The surprise second largest party was the so-called left coalition of SYRIZA which benefitted most from the discontent with the EU deal. It gained votes from PASOK but also from of young professionals who would lose their professional association status under the proposed EU-sponsored reforms.[11] As many of these were former New Democracy supporters it can hardly be trumpeted as a new rise of the electoral left as some are doing both inside and outside Greece. The voters have not given a vote of confidence to SYRIZA, because this party apparently lacks any serious alternative to the deep crisis. Its vote was achieved through a reaction against increasingly harsh austerity. Another paradox of the situation is that the voters want to renegotiate with the EU rather than leave the eurozone for a fistful of dodgy drachma and an even more uncertain future. The resultant confusion is political paralysis for which the only solution the Greek ruling class are offering is – another election. Not one of these parties offers an alternative to the continuation of the capitalist system which is the root of all the misery in the first place. And it is not

The Unions

Even where an increasing number of workers are abandoning hope in the electoral system there is still no clarity about a way forward. Many agree that workers should resist austerity but think that uniting as workers means putting our trust in unions. On face value the idea of all being together to force some redress has a certain appeal but it falls down on two counts. In the first place the unions don’t unite us but actually divide us. In second place the assumption behind all the union campaigns is that there is still plenty of money about, it just needs to come our way a bit more. In other words capitalism is really OK and just needs to be better run to be fairer. This is utopian but not surprising. The unions which once were real workers’ organisations are today bloated bureaucracies with paid officials on 6 figure salaries. They are a well-integrated part of the capitalist system.

All the above features were made obvious in the recent street protests in Spain after the Rajoy government announced that the austerity measures already undertaken were not enough. A further ?36 billion of cuts would have to be made to meet the agreed debt reduction target agreed with the EU.[12] Spain already has the highest unemployment in Europe and this latest cut will reduce its people to the same level of desperation as those in Greece. The anger on the streets was predictable but the unions were divided as to how to react. The two biggest establishment unions the Workers’ Commission (CC.OO linked to the Communist Party) and the General Workers’ Union (UGT – linked to the Socialist Party) tried to take control of class anger by calling a general strike (for only one day of course). The Daily Telegraph reported

In Madrid, protestors stopped traffic through the capital as they took to the streets braving the rain to protest austerity measures. Coming together for a rally in Puerta del Sol, the site of Los Indignados protest last summer, demonstrators were fired up by the words of union leaders.

"Nearly a million workers across Spain are in the streets saying 'No' to this way of understanding labour _relations," said Ignacio Fernandez Toxo, secretary general of the CC.OO union._

Eh? Were workers only complaining that the unions had not been consulted before they were sacked? We don’t think so but the emphasis is indicative of the union mentality – they just want to be asked nicely by the state before they manage our exploitation. And then they will still negotiate away our jobs and conditions. The time, however, for negotiations is long past.

The Real Alternative

The real alternative to playing the game the capitalist way is much harder to take in and, despite the misery inflicted on us, most are not yet ready to contemplate it. This is no less than the overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement by a new social order in which money, debt and exploitation will no longer exist.

This is clearly not going to be an immediate quick fix. The process of mounting a fightback has to begin from the working class itself autonomously organising their own struggle via mass assemblies and strike committees which are accountable to those mass meetings of all the workers in the struggle. To some extent this is already happening, particularly in Spain. The Indignados and Occupy movements have helped to raise the political awareness of the need for an anti-capitalist agenda. In some places the mass meetings have recognised that the real secret of success is to keep everyone involved by having wider debates about the current situation and what we do now. To take one example, here is an extract from a leaflet put out by the Workers’ Group of Palencia:

FOR A STRIKE WITHOUT INTERMEDIARIES

Once again the ruling class has reminded us who is in charge; this time with the Labour Reform which leave workers even more at the mercy of the employer. From now on, whether you keep your job or not will depend exclusively upon the boss’s need to maximise profits. This is not due to this or that government but rather expresses the fact that for Capital we are nothing more than commodities. Faced with this prospect we have no other option than to struggle: What should this struggle be? How to carry it out?

The majority unions offer us their model: they command, we obey. They make a lot of fuss about the Labour Reform, but at the same time they cut deals that make things worse for the workers. In reality, our rights are of no importance to them. For them we are nothing more than a number that justifies their existence and their subsidies. What is important to them is that we are exploited and enslaved while they continue their charade! They are nothing more than puppets in the service of the capitalists. Their real function, which is why they continue to exist, is to absorb, divert and subdue the real struggle of the working class; to stop it becoming a real danger to the system and its ruling class.

... we cannot follow the majority unions nor their strategies. In order to nullify all revolutionary struggle, they have agreed to hold a strike with conditions, the so-called “minimum services”. When have we ever seen a war where a pact has been signed with the enemy in order to “not cause too many problems”? The aim of a strike is to cause harm, to oblige the employers to bend before our interests. To strike where it hurts them most: the economy. This will not be done with an agreed strike and only on one day: it will be achieved through indefinite wildcat strikes.

We cannot give the traitorous unions and the opportunists on the Left of Capital more time. We must organise ourselves and without intermediaries in assemblies, in workers’ councils. Only through determined action and without conditions can we defeat the exploiters and their servants in all areas: from the stopping of the Labour Reform to the destruction of the capitalist system.

AGAINST THE CUTS

ORGANISE OURSELVES WITHOUT INTERMEDIARIES![13]

What is equally significant here is that the leaflet does not stop at a mere defensive struggle against the cuts but puts the issue of the system that causes it. This is already a step beyond that of the Indignados and Occupy movement agendas. The issue raised here is not to make capitalism fair but to get rid of it.

And this is not only a question of how we organise. It requires political consciousness. The problem is that all these movements arise now in one place then in another. Political consciousness is so hard to hold onto. Moreover, if we are to avoid the pitfalls of the past we have to take on board the lessons of our own history. In our understanding those who share the political agenda of the need to overthrow capitalism, the need for a society without money or exploitation, without a state and oppression need to get together in a global political entity which for want a better word we call a party. This party is not a government in waiting but an international fighting body whose single aim is to advance the programme of the world revolution In itself it does not take power in any place. The party’s organs are not the medium for the mass struggle. Rather the international party will fight for the establishment of organs of workers’ power (or “workers’ councils” as the Palencia workers say in their leaflet). And once these organs are established it fights within them, as part of the class to which it belongs, against any return to capitalist schemas (not least those which will be proposed by the state capitalist and social democratic left). This is obviously not a perspective which will be taken up immediately by masses of workers but it is the only perspective which offers us a real alternative. This is the perspective which we are patiently fighting for everywhere we can.

Footnotes

[1] See for example “Banking and credit, however, thereby also become the most powerful means for driving capitalist production beyond its own barriers and one of the most effective vehicles for crisi and swindling” Capital Vol III p. 742 Penguin version.

[2] bbc.co.uk UK’s Debts Biggest in the World

[3] It is this overdependence on the financial sector that has led to the total isolation of the British government in Europe over the nature and scope of the Basel III regulations. See “Osborne hand hovers over No vote on key reform” in the Financial Times 4.5.2012

[4] Report by Mckinsey Global Institute, available on mckinsey.com

[5] See “Capitalism in the Quagmire of Debt”. Those looking for our opinion on the future of the Eurozone will find more on that issue there.

[6] See blog.occupiedlondon.org

[7] See channel4.com and for the UK “Credit boom left low-income groups in debt forever” Financial Times 4.5.2012

[8] See leftcom.org

[9] See leftcom.org or read Aurora, Bulletin of the Communist workers’ Organisation. Free to anyone who sends a stamped addressed envelope to BM CWO, WC1N 3XX.

[10] ft.com

[11] In Greece there is a special status for dozens of professions. These professions are “closed” because a special permission is required in order for someone to practice. For example, a would-be notary, taxi driver or pharmacist has to buy a licence from a retiring one. The cost for a pharmacy licence is upward of 400,000$. There are more than 130 “closed” professions: beauticians, drama and dance school instructors, bakers, antiques dealers, insurance agents, insurance consultants, employment consultants, diagnostics centre staff, divers, cameramen, driving school instructors, cab drivers, tourist bus drivers, newspaper stand owners, electricians, sound technicians, private school owners, tobacco sellers, gun manufacturers and sellers, hairdressers, private investigators, port workers, real estate agents, lifeguards, carpenters, financiers, opticians, auditors, movie/theatre director and even car mechanic.

The opening of the so-called “closed” professions comes after strong pressure from the troika (IMF, ECB, EU) – however some real profit-making professions like pharmacists and lawyers will still remain closed.

[12] And to top it all more money will be needed for Bankia, the bank set up two years ago to absorb much of the bad debt is now in trouble as the banks it took on board had understated their debts and overstated their assets. It has debts of over ?52 billion. The Spanish Government has had to nationalise it in order to save the banking system but this has only added to its sovereign debt burden.

[13] This was quoted by “Ernie” of the ICC on libcom.org and we are grateful to him for pointing us to it.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Revolutionary Perspectives

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You can’t fight austerity through elections!

After the replacement of President Sarkozy by Hollande in France, and the electoral slump of the parties of the outgoing Greek government, a commentator in the Guardian (8/5/12) was not alone in declaring that “Revolt against austerity is sweeping Europe.” Leftists saw “a growing backlash against austerity across Europe” (Socialist Worker 12/5/12), “deep popular opposition to austerity measures” (wsws.org 8/5/12) and even declared that “Europe turns left” (Workers Power May 2012).

In reality, whatever the level of dissatisfaction felt at election time, the ruling bourgeoisie will continue to impose and intensify its policies of austerity. Voting against governments can happen because of the depth of discontent, but it doesn’t change anything. For the working class it’s only through the mass organisation of its struggles that anything can be achieved. The election game is played entirely on the bourgeoisie’s terms, but workers still troop into the polling stations (if in decreasing numbers) because they still have widespread illusions in what could be achieved. There’s still a belief that elections can somehow be used as a means for social change, or that there are alternative economic policies that the capitalist state could follow. There has been no ‘revolt’ across Europe expressed in these elections, although there is definitely a lot of anger which has been impotently misdirected into the various democratic mechanisms. Having said that, if you actually examine what’s happened in recent elections they do reveal a lot about the capitalist class and the state of its political apparatus.

Not just the usual seesaw

Since the financial crisis of autumn 2008 a number of individual leaders and political parties have been replaced because of their identification with public spending cuts, job losses, wage and pension reductions, and all the other aspects of economic ‘rigour’ and austerity. There is no overall bourgeois strategy, just the removal of parties and individuals and their replacement by others, whether from the left or the right or by coalitions. The ruling class is just reacting to events without a clear idea of how it will arrange its political forces in the future. And it’s not taking long for the new leaders to begin to be discredited as they are exposed as being in continuity with their predecessors.

In November 2008 John McCain was defeated by Barack Obama in the US Presidential election partly because of his connection with the policies of George Bush and the fact that the US economy had been in recession since late 2007 in a crisis deeper than anything since the 1930s.

In the UK, following the general election of May 2010, the Labour Party was replaced by a Conservative and Liberal Democrat government, the first coalition since the Second World War. The British bourgeoisie, usually so assured in its political manoeuvres, was not able to accomplish its usual Labour/Tory swap. Since the election it has also had difficulties in presenting Labour as a viable ‘alternative’.

In Belgium it took 18 months from the election of June 2010 before a government was finally formed.

In the general election in Ireland in February 2011, Fianna Fail, the party that had been the largest since the 1920s, saw its proportion of the vote go from 42% to 17%. The Irish government is now a Right/Left coalition of Fine Gael and Labour. Ireland was in recession in 2008 and 2009. It returned to recession in the third quarter of 2011. The new government has predictably shown itself no different from the previous FF/Green coalition. The myth of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ faded out a long time ago.

In the Portuguese legislative elections of June 2011 the governing Socialist Party saw its support go from 37% to 28%. Electoral turnout declined to a historically low level of 58%. Unemployment continues to rise, up to more than 13%, having been less than 6% in 2002. Portugal is in its worst recession since the 1970s. The conditions for its 2011 bailout from the EU and IMF have meant a vicious series of government spending cuts.

In the Spanish general election of November 2011 the votes for the ruling Socialist Party went from 44% to 29%, and there was growing support for minor parties. Under the conservative People’s Party Spain has fallen back into recession. Unemployment, which has been growing throughout the last five years, has reached record levels with a 24.4% jobless rate (over 50% of under 25s), the highest figures in the EU.

In Italy in November 2011 Silvio Berlusconi was replaced by a government led by economist Mario Monti. His cabinet was constituted of unelected ‘technocrats’. He has introduced a range of austerity measures – with the support of most of both Italian houses of parliament.

In Slovenia in December 2011 there was a parliamentary election in which a new party, Positive Slovenia, that had only been founded in late October, got the highest proportion of the vote. After a period of manoeuvres and negotiations the outgoing 4-party coalition was replaced by a 5-party coalition which only had a Pensioners’ Party in common, but not Positive Slovenia. With the Slovenian economy is in recession, a new programme of austerity measures was adopted by the Slovenian Parliament on 11 May. Major unions which had staged demonstrations against the programme have said they would not oppose it with a referendum. Last year four pieces of legislation were rejected by referendum.

In presidential elections held in Finland in January and February this year the long period of the decline of the Social Democratic Party reached a new low point. The new president is the first in 30 years not to be a Social Democrat. Voter turnout was the lowest since 1950.

In the Netherlands in April this year the coalition government resigned after only 558 days in power. The parties have been in dispute over budget cuts.

In the recent French Presidential election Hollande’s victory was in many ways due to his not being Sarkozy. Despite his claims to have a different approach on questions such as investment he will have no choice but to continue the attack on living and working conditions. Hollande said before his first visit to Angela Merkel that he would bring "The gift of growth, jobs, and economic activity." Although this is the usual politician’s hot air, corresponding to no material reality, at least the situation in France is by no means as desperate as that in Greece.

Greek politics in a mess

Following the latest elections in Greece it was clear the parties of the PASOK/New Democracy/LAOS coalition had lost the most support. It should be recalled that the coalition had only been installed last November, to replace George Papendreou’s government and implement the measures required by the IMF/EU/ECB. In the elections, despite there being a choice of 32 parties, there was a significant reduction in the number of people voting to a lowest ever figure of 65%. This contrasts with the previous low figure of 71% in 2009 and previous figures in the high 70s or even more than 80% that Greece was used to. If the French election result mainly expressed opposition to Sarkozy, the Greek result showed mainly opposition to the government coalition and the measures it had undertaken. The fact that the Greek parliament now has four parties of the Left and three of the Right where once it was dominated by PASOK/New Democracy shows the degree to which the bourgeoisie’s political forces have splintered. The prospects of a new coalition without a new election seem limited.

There has been a lot of attention in the media on the role of the leftwing coalition Syriza, portrayed as a new force without whose co-operation or tolerance no government could function. Because they claim to be against austerity they will, for the moment, quite possibly continue to increase their support. However, whether they operate as a buffer between government and striking workers, or actually join a government coalition, they do not represent anything new. Along with its anti-austerity phrases Syriza has clearly stated that Greece should remain in the EU and the euro, debts can not just be written off, but it would prefer some more benign conditions for receiving the latest bailout.

Where the emergence of Syriza is a sign of some residual flexibility from the bourgeoisie, the sharpest evidence of the decomposition of Greek capitalism’s political apparatus is seen in the gains made by Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) at the expense of LAOS. Greece has had right wing parties before (LAOS is the most recent example), and in Metaxas they had a real dictator in the late 1930s, the contemporary of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar. However, Chrysi Avgi isn’t just another racist, right-wing party demonised by the Left. It’s anti-immigrant policies are backed up by physical attacks on foreigners. It has also mounted attacks on its political opponents, tried to intimidate journalists and has links with Nazi groups.

Chrysi Avgi campaigned on the slogan “So we can rid the land of filth” with candidates claiming to be more soldiers than politicians. They claim to be ‘Greek nationalists’ in the mould of Metaxas, rather than being neo-Nazis. You could be forgiven for being confused on this when you see the black symbol on the red background of their party flag. It looks very similar to a swastika, although it is in fact a ‘meander’ or ‘Greek fret.’ Whatever label you want to pin on them, Chrysi Avgi are clear evidence of the further decay of bourgeois politics. Parties in Greece that support the return of the monarchy are barred from standing at elections, but Chrysi Avgi has 21 members in the new parliament.

The Greek elections are the most obvious example of how the bourgeoisie across Europe is coping politically with the economic crisis. It can’t offer any genuine economic alternatives to austerity, but it is also using up its political alternatives as parties take their turns to impose programmes that will not challenge the impact of the economic crisis. There is no particular political strategy, just a day-to-day reaction to events. Bourgeois democracy continues to function, but the ruling class has a decreasing variety of ways to deploy its political apparatus. The number of people who are voting is in decline; new parties and coalitions are emerging to cope with changed situations. But, for the working class there is nothing to be gained by the replacement of one government by another, or in any participation in the democratic game.

All the political parties are factions of one state capitalist class. This is one of the reasons that democracy is so important for the bourgeoisie, because it gives the illusion of offering a number of different choices. For the working class only struggle on its own terms can set in motion a force that can break the social stalemate between the classes. The bourgeoisie has nothing to offer, not in its economy, and not in its elections. The working class can only rely on its self-organisation, on a growing consciousness of what’s at stake in its struggles.

Car 14/5/12